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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

I have definitely rounded the corner from feeling like the birth is forever away in the distant future to ack! I'm going to have a baby in a matter of weeks and how on earth will I be ready in time?! I wondered if I'd ever be chomping at the bit to get the baby out toward the end, but I'm usually thinking more along the lines of "give me some more time; I have so much to get done still." Of course, my babies were born at 38 and 39 weeks, so their arrivals both felt like surprises.

I feel really good in my body right now: strong, capable, not too awkward or cumbersome (although I have delegated certain things to Eric, such as putting drywall mud on the hard-to-reach ceiling areas above the tub or carrying really heavy boxes of marble tile). I enjoy doing physical work while I'm pregnant. I have an almost perverse sense of wanting to show that I'm not helpless and incapable just because I'm growing a baby. I probably go overboard sometimes, like when we installed our privacy fence during a major heat wave this summer...that did both of us in.

Yesterday we tiled the shower, and today we tiled around the tub. Tomorrow we'll install the tile on the floor...which means only 2 more days (or as soon as we get the grout installed) to having a working toilet downstairs! No more having to use my friend's Luggable Loo for middle-of-the-night bathroom trips.

I apply the mortar and lay the tiles while Eric does all the cutting. We used marble tiles with lots of decorative accents. The lighting was poor for this picture, but you can see the mosaics we installed. The narrow mosaic strips came from large mosaic tiles that we cut apart with scissors. Much cheaper than buying decorative mosaic borders. We interspersed larger brown glass tiles in the mosaic strip.

So back to pregnancy...I did a science experiment last week. I bought new test strips for my glucometer and tested my fasting levels for 4 days in a row. I also tested simultaneously with the old and new strips to see if the old strips were perhaps giving me inaccurate readings. Guess what....?

The old strips were bad! With my new strips, my fasting levels were consistently around 84-86. With the old strips, they were around 105. These numbers were from the same finger prick.

Lesson learned from this whole saga of blood glucose testing: be sure the test strips are new and accurate before taking any actions from your readings. Now, the old strips hadn't yet reached the expiration date marked on the canister, but I don't know how long they had been opened. (You're supposed to use them within 6 months of opening.)

As with all my pregnancies, my fundal height is measuring dead-on. I've gained right around 20 lbs so far, almost identical with my other two pregnancies. This baby likes to hang out ROP/ROT, sticking its butt on the right of my ribcage and its feet on the left. Just like Dio.

Stuff to do in the next week or so:

Plan a blessingway date and send out invites

Buy a 25' drinking water quality hose for filling the birth tub. I can't find my old one...I think that it never got returned from one of the families I lent the tub to.

Finish the bathroom and enjoy the new jacuzzi tub!!

Get supplies ready for my midwife's home visit next week

Sew together the quilt squares for the baby's birth quilt (still waiting on about 6 squares...if you're one of those people, hurry up and get them done!)

10 comments:

The tile looks absolutely gorgeous. I can relate to trying to finish home projects before the little one's arrival: we have been re-doing our master bedroom. Which seemed much more important once we decided on a homebirth!

I have the same strange urge to "prove" I'm not handicapped, just because I'm pregnant.

Add to that my husband being deployed on occasion, I pretty much do everything by myself anyway. Including carrying 50lb bags of dog food, and shoveling snow from our driveway. Overdoing it? Well, it didn't feel like it at the time.

Love your updates! Zari is such a beautiful little (big!) girl...and your bathroom pics reiterate how amazingly talented you are. As always, wish you were closer, and can't wait to hear all about this baby's grand entrance!xo

I felt the same way as you during pregnancy- I had to keep doing physical exercise just to show that I was still capable of it! I even went to the step class 40 weeks pregnant. I gained about the same amount of weight as you, also. By the end I was up 30 pounds. Posts like this make me want to get pregnant again, even though I want to space another child out a little more..

It seems to me in North America we are so terrified of pregnant women doing anything. I was recently in Mexico and there were tons of pregnant women around doing exactly what I was doing-and no one was worried about their levels of physical exertion. What silliness we live with here.

Of course there are pregnant women who cannot do physical exertion, and I've known many, but most women can and should continue to live their lives.

You go girl. Looks great!(And I hope you got your proposal in on time; can you let us know what you submitted?)

I was still mowing the lawn at 36w pregnant with the twins. Haha! I was quite the neighborhood spectacle. I went backpacking at high-ish altitude with my DH when I was 5-6mo preg with my first baby. It was an amazing experience! I hope I can be more active this time around than I was with the twins.

Hello Rixa! You look great in the picks! I loved doing physical work too and you know I'm all about not looking weak or helpless just because I'm was prego, but I may have overdone it this last pregnancy a bit. Trying to get my garden ready for winter in early October was taxing not to mention felling a tree, putting up a privacy fence, taking care of 2 kids and an infant husband(LOL). I believe that is what gave me so much false labor and stressed out my uterus. I had a lot of bleeding after the birth and after several hours of it had 3 manual extractions ( soooo not fun)! So please take it easy! Can't wait to hear about the new baby soon! Birthing in that new tub sounds AWSOME!

Aha!!!! I was really wondering if the strips or the monitoring was wonky. Glad to finally have the answer!

If the strips are exposed to too much humidity, they can go bad. So if the strips were in the bathroom or the kitchen, two areas with lots of humidity, and were open for any length of time there, that might explain it.

Or sometimes there's just a bad batch of strips. Exactly why it's always a good idea to doublecheck accuracy before making any actions on your results!